Page 75 of Alien Peacock
“Get down,” Arelion calmly says, and I do as he suggests. He carefully aims and takes down two more. The rest scurry away.
As we get to the main market hall, a small pink ball of fur comes running fast towards us. “There you are! Follow me! That way, there’s an ambush!”
“Are you sure, Bari?” I ask, looking across the hall to the hangar portal. “I can’t see any enemies that way.”
“That’s why it’s called an ambush,” Bari yips. “You can’t see it until it’s too late. I know a way, though!” She runs into another corridor.
Arelion looks behind us. “We can just wait for Cerak to catch up. We don’t need to fear any ambushes with him here.”
Tara draws up to the wall. “There are a lot of enemies on this station. We should get away before they come.”
Bari stops and looks at us. “Come on! What are you waiting for?”
Arelion and I exchange glances.
“For afriend,” I tell her.
A few seconds later, Cerak comes flying towards us. He’s back to his regular trash can look, but he’s going so fast I instinctively duck before he comes to a sudden stop.
“That was most of them,” he says with his tinny voice. “Buroteo and some of his cronies got away, though.”
“You have many hidden talents,” I tell him as I straighten up. “Can you keep us safe until we get to the ship?”
“Probably,” he says. “I was made for battles on planets, not inside stations like this. But if you don’t mind the station being broken a little bit, then I feel confident that I can.”
Bari trots back towards us. “I see now that you don’t trust me. I suppose I can’t blame you.”
I shift the grip on my fighting stick. “Why can’t you blame us?”
The small, furry robot stops. Then she seems to morph and stretch in every direction. Every hair on her fur becomes a long thread, so thin they’re barely visible.
Arelion grabs me and pulls me behind him, the way he always does when there’s danger.
We back off as Bari’s long threads come together to create a dense grid of interlocking triangles. In a matter of a second, the robot has turned herself from a small puppy into a weird, scary, and profoundly alien machine the same height as Arelion. It’s like a giant, faintly pink spider web spun around and through the skeleton of some fearsome alien predator. It’s clearly there, but at the same time it consists almost entirely of air.
“Because you’re right,” Bari says, still with her cheerful, girly voice. “You shouldn’t have trusted me.”
A cold shiver goes through me. The contrast between her voice and the terrifying machine she has become makes my skin crawl. Bari has become something entirely new.
Arelion aims his gun. “State your intentions!”
“I will deliver you to Buroteo, as I have been ordered,” Bari yips. “I’m honestly surprised about how difficult that has been.”
“You betrayed us to the Bululg every chance you got,” I accuse her. “It was you all along!”
“It would have been so much easier if they had just captured you,” she says. “I told them exactly what to do. But organics… Well, they tend to mess things up. Orders are orders, and Iama robot. Imustobey.”
“Obey whom?” I ask. “The Bululg?”
“Buroteo is my master. He ordered me to follow Arelion some time ago. And I did, from a distance.”
I’m not surprised about this. For a while I thought Cerak was the traitor. But when he started blasting Buroteo’s guys back there, I knew it wasn’t him. Then there was only one option left.
Some pieces are falling into place. “You killed the Bululg when we boarded the saucer. You didn’t want Arelion to talk to them, because they would reveal you as the traitor! I wondered why you were suddenly right beside me in that control room.”
“I ran past you,” Bari admits. “I can be very fast when I want.”
“Did you meet me by chance?” I ask, conscious we don’t have time for this but still needing answers.